Originally published in the Chicago Review, Fall 1993
[Pushcart Prize nominee, 1994]

Reprinted as the leadoff story in the anthology Voices of the Xiled (Doubleday, cloth
and paper), 1994

In
Portland, Oregon, where it doesn’t rain several dozen days a year,
people know the odds and leave their windshield wipers on when they park
their cars, and deep puddles rarely form on streets planned and planed for
wetness, and the rain, as if in deference to engineering and expectation,
never falls in sheets and torrents, but takes the form of a constant drizzle
barely thicker than a mist, a drizzle that, falling through the air,
pastelizes the colors of the buildings, and that having fallen, grays out and
darkens those colors; in Portland, landlocked Portland, connected by a river
to the sky, a very thin young man with an electric guitar in a hard-shell
case walked in the gutter of Yamhill Street to even out his height advantage
over the young woman beside him.

A voice so high it was more
a whistle than a voice came faintly through the drizzle:
"Bass-tarss!"

Billy and Melissa turned the
corner and the source of the sound opened up to them: three bald male
figures, one of them with an arm extended toward an old black man who was
falling away from the arm, toppling lock-kneed as stiffly as a Douglas Fir.
The upturned hand of the old black man, falling, and the downturned hand of
the young white man, felling him, were almost touching, suspended in a
release that seemed a caress or a caress that seemed a release, each
lingering on the moment of contact before giving the other back to the other’s
world.

It was a long block, and
sight and sound were very slightly out of sync: Billy and Melissa saw the old
man fall against a metal trash can a split-second before they heard the
clatter, saw him open his mouth, like a clown in a silent movie, before his
voice rang out thinly: " ... young ... bastards!"

"Skinheads," said
Melissa. Bottom-heavy in spit-polished military boots and baggy camouflage
pants, they wore khaki jackets with swastika shoulder patches. One had White
& Proud stenciled across his back like the name of an athletic team.

"Watch the Strat?"
said Billy, setting the guitar case at Melissa’s feet.

To Melissa, who had never
lost the thick-limbed, bowlegged swagger of the child athlete, Billy had
always looked twiggish, kitelike; but now, as he ran away from her toward the
skinheads, toward the unknown, toward the future, his orange nylon shell flew
open, and the slivers of his legs beneath it seemed no more substantial than
a butterfly’s body between its giant wings, tiny, careening, willy-nilly,
buffeted by chance. Billy’s shout came back at her inarticulately down
the long block.

The white-and-proud skinhead
was kneeling before the old man, who was on his hands and knees and whose
long jaw, lengthened by a scraggly white beard, opened longer. The youth
tilted his stubbly head and parted his lips as if to give the old man a kiss
or a bite on the face.

Melissa saw Billy grab the
skinhead’s collar from behind and yank him backward, heard herself
murmur Billy’s name, and heard in her murmur a warning, inaudible as
all such warnings always are; heard in her own voice, it seemed to her later,
a voice that was not her voice and an awareness of all that would happen
next.